New details from Maria Bartiromo’s sudden firing from Fox News reveal internal upheaval that resulted in her being completely isolated at work, as her own staff was banned from speaking to her and her primary producer was fired alongside her.
Puck News’s Dylan Byers reported that executive producer Patrick Ignozzi was fired from Bartiromo’s show on Thursday, following her out the door after she was sent packing for “betraying” Fox News by offering the Trump administration information on how the network was covering the president.
On top of that, Fox News kept the Mornings with Maria host isolated from her colleagues for weeks, a move stemming from issues over the $787.5 million settlement Fox News was ordered to pay to Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 due to false claims of election fraud in 2020.
“In order to talk to her, you had to go to management,” an anonymous source told Mediate. “[That’s how we] knew something was up.… Even her own staff had to go through management.… People were freaking out.” The source also noted that Bartiromo wasn’t even reachable over the phone, being completely iced out from the Fox News work environment.
It’s unclear where Bartiromo will find herself next.
Bartiromo’s lawyer, Bryan Freedman, contacted The New Republic claiming that reports of her departure from Fox News were “absolutely and unequivocally false”—even though the network itself had put out a statement announcing it on Thursday.
“Make no mistake, we have the receipts and witnesses and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise,” Freedman said in a statement. “Those reporting her firing or the incredulous facts supporting that fiction have exhibited a complete and utter reckless disregard for the truth.”
Donald Trump’s administration has made a game of the president’s deadly crackdown on immigrants.
The White House launched a new arcade website Thursday that hosts a series of retro-style video games touting the administration’s policy priorities—including one where players can detain undocumented immigrants crossing the border.
In “Rio Run,” players are directed to “pick up every crosser in the lot.” An avatar of a balding white man dressed in a suit and tie collects stationary bodies, and adds them to a growing line of orange-jumpsuited figures floating behind him. The snake-style game evokes the horrific images of chained immigrants boarding planes to foreign countries.
If you thought that was callous and dehumanizing, just wait: In a Tetris-style game called “Build the Wall,” players are directed to stack bricks in order to stave off a “border zombie siege.” It has never felt more clear that the Trump administration is made up entirely of terminally online right-wing trolls desperate to appease deportation fanboys.
Other White House arcade games invite users to “sort the school lunch to Make America Healthy Again,” or use a net to catch cash and gold to “fill your kids’ Trump accounts.”
A White House official told CNN the arcade was “an effort to further contrast between a culture of fun and winning and the dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.”
It’s hard to get much darker than turning a mass detention policy into some kind of game—a legal front on which the Trump administration is definitely not winning. A total of eight federal appeals courts have ruled that the policy is unlawful.
Embattled Democratic Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman blew off meetings with disabled veterans, the families of slain police officers, children’s hospital officials, and countless constituents in his past two years in Congress—once again displaying his indifference and apathy to any cause that isn’t shamelessly lobbying for Israel.
